By the Gods!
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Doubting Thomas
Just a quick one for you today, mythfans. The picture above is one that I snapped personally on my recent trip to Paris, within Notre Dame cathedral (now that you know the source, the horrendous quality is explained; it’s dim in there, okay?).
Thomas was one of the apostles of Jesus of Nazareth according to the gospel of John in the New Testament. After Jesus’ death by crucifixion, he was believed to have resurrected and briefly returned to visit his buddies. Thomas, being a shrewd man, (by comparison) wasn’t willing to believe just anything. He decided to investigate the situation more closely by putting his fingers in Jesus’ wounds, taking their friendship to a new level.
Upon seeing that the wound was authentic, Thomas put his seal of approval on the resurrection.
What I personally like about this story is skepticism and scrutiny on the part of ol’ Tom. At least for a single moment, he’s one of the only guys willing to use his noggin and raise an eyebrow at the seemingly magical.
Saint Christopher
Alright, friends: hearken to the tale of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of the traveler! As it happens, I’m heading out on a trip to the UK and France for a few weeks as of tomorrow, and I hereby invoke the power of all mythic figures associated with brave pilgrims such as myself.
Back to Christopher. Born in Canaan (according to Western accounts) in the 3rd century CE, Christopher was a mammoth of a man. Almost 7 feet tall and built like a tank, Christopher served the Caananite King as #1 hired muscle. After seeing the king in a few moments of weakness, Christopher decided that only the greatest king there was was worthy of his services, so he decided to bounce out of Canaan. He found a king who called himself the greatest (unnamed in the story), but this king kept crossing himself out of fear of the Devil.
“Now hold on a second,” Christopher thought aloud, “if you’re afraid of the Devil, that means he’s greater than you! I’m gonna go work for that guy!” And so he set out to give Satan his resume. Eventually Christopher stumbled upon some bandits, and their leader referred to himself as “the Devil.” Not being one worried about checking sources, Christopher took this boast at face value, and took up employment with desert-bandit-satan. The problem with this boss, as it turned out for Christopher, was the he was constantly avoiding any wayside crosses. Since the devil was evidently afraid of Christ, Christopher made the decision to serve the good ol’ King of Kings, Christ himself.
Now, Jesus having died some centuries before, Christopher asked a hermit-priest how he could best serve his Lord. The priest suggested prayer and fasting, which Christopher thought was a lame suggestion and refused to do. Taking note of his immense size and rippling muscles, the priest told Christopher to help the puny people in the area to cross a particularly deep river by carrying them across.
For a while Christopher worked as the ferryman-hulk, and then a little child asked him for passage across the river. As soon as the kid clambered up on his back, Christopher almost buckled under his deceptively crushing mass. Staggering to stand with the child on his back, Christopher slowly grunted to the river, and made his way across the water, his muscles screaming the whole way. As the infinitely heavy child dismounted, Christopher said “You almost killed me with your girth, kid. Not cool.” The child replied “You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.” The magic baby then disappeared in a flash, and Christopher was left with the greatest bar story to tell his friends in the history of the universe.
A little later, a king ordered him to be killed for not shutting up about it. Bad luck for river-hulk.
The Demiurge
When we’re talking about the Gnostics, all the rules change for what you know about Christianity. Well, not all the rules, but the big ones. The Demiurge was the name for the Gnostic deity who jealously guarded and reigned over the world, lost in a fog of its own ignorance. In the Gnostic view, this was the god of the Bible (at that time, this would be referring to the Hebrew Bible, as the New Testament was still in the process of being assembled and standardized).
Right off the bat— that definition of the Demiurge is a simplified one. The Gnostic view, one developed through decades of philosophical and theological debate, was that Wisdom, known as Sophia, was the true creator of the world, and her child was the Demiurge. The Demiurge was born into a cloud of its own ignorance, and remained unaware of Sophia’s existence above itself; it thus assumed that it was the greatest force in the universe, the creator of our world, and our natural ruler. The goal of the Gnostic movement was to reunite the spirit with the divine spark of Sophia through thought, prayer, and internal discovery.
To sum up, the Gnostics thought of the Hebrew/Christian God as a pouty infant with both hands on the wheel of a speeding universe. This high-speed baby they named the Demiurge.
One last thing— while this is what the Gnostic view of the Demiurge consisted of, there was also the idea of the Demiurge developed by Plato, centuries earlier, which referred to a more benevolent artisan of the universe. Be aware of the difference, for as you know: knowledge is power. While that thought may be laughably cliché, I use it in a form as un-ironic as possible.
Unless I’m just being really ironic.
Enoch and the Watchers: Part Two
Even though the Watchers, with their angelic know-how, taught their human charges a great deal–-they showed them how to make weapons, cosmetics, mirrors, and to use sorcery—God couldn’t abide the existence of the Nephilim, fruit of those who’d betrayed his trust and fled from his service. Semyaza, the leader of the Watchers, earned a great deal of God’s wrath by being the principal tutor of humanity in ways that were beyond them at the time, and by inciting the Watchers to rebel in the first place.
God decided that the Watchers and the Nephilim had to be taken care of. With his buddy, Enoch, acting as chief administrator, he organized a worldwide flood, that would end all life on Earth, thus washing clean the perceived stain of the Nephilim with the rest of humanity. This was put into effect in the time of Noah, the great-grandson of Enoch, and from there the familiar deluge story of Genesis would kick in.
It’s a sad story, in a lot of ways. The great crime of the Watchers was caring too deeply for the humans, those they were charged to care for. The book sets the familiar tone of raising the idea of humanity, with all its faults, as the greatest gift that heaven could bestow; even the immortal, ancient, powerful angels envied the lives of humans, and for that envy, their children were washed away, and the Watchers themselves were bound in the valleys of the earth, to wait there until Judgment Day.
Enoch and the Watchers: Part One
Christian/Jewish scripture rarely maintains a consensus, and when it comes to angels, everything’s up in the air. When we talk about the Watchers, we’re delving deep into Christian and Jewish apocrypha— specifically, the Book of Enoch. The writings attributed to Enoch were seen as real scripture by many Christian authorities writing in the first and second centuries CE, and may have been similarly important to Jewish groups about this time. However, the Book of Enoch was removed from canon in the years to come, except for in the Ethiopian Christian Church, where it remained a fundamental part of scripture.
Now, Enoch was the great-grandfather of Noah, and was elected by God as his all-around favourite guy, and was essentially named “greatest dude on the planet.” He was plucked from the mortal world, and raised to the level of Metatron: in some canon, he is seen as the voice of god, and was “promoted” to angelhood. He was also seen as the inventor of reading and writing, and was in charge of doing all of the big guy’s dirty work on Earth— like dealing with those pesky rebel Watchers.
The Watchers, y’see, were a group of angels who had been charged with watching over humanity. They just watched a little too closely, if you catch my meaning; they became deeply enamoured with the lives of men, and with the lovely wiggle ‘n shake of human women. They gave up their duties, descended down to Earth, and began to procreate with undoubtedly surprised people. The result of this interesting and as yet unseen union were the Nephilim— in the book of Genesis, they were described as “warriors of renown,” which you’d expect from Angelic stock. In the Book of Enoch, however, they were giants that would bring ruin on the world, and were the cause of everything bad.
St. Peter’s Basilica is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City and it has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world. One author wrote: “Only gradually does it dawn upon us – as we watch people draw near to this or that monument, strangely they appear to shrink; they are, of course, dwarfed by the scale of everything in the building. This in its turn overwhelms us.”
Around the inside of the dome is written, in letters 2 metres (6.6 ft) high:
TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM. TIBI DABO CLAVES REGNI CAELORVM
(“…you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. … I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven…” Vulgate, Matthew 16:18–19
The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson described St Peter’s as “an ornament of the earth ….the sublime of the beautiful.”
Image by Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Eostre and Easter
The Easter weekend isn’t over yet, folks. Time to get your learnin’ on. Ever wonder where the name “Easter” came from? The Germanic goddess Eostre gets the credit on that one. She was a goddess of fertility and plenty, and the Anglo-Saxons had a month named after her. For all of us on the Gregorian calendar, that’d match up with April. Anglo-Saxon and Northern European festivals for the Easter-month (the “Eostre-monath”) involved eggs and hares, and these came to be attached to Eostre herself. What with it being a spring festival and all, located on or around the Equinox, themes of birth and fertility were only natural. Hard to beat rabbits when it comes to fertility, I suppose.
Now, how did Eostre get attached to the Christian celebration of the resurrection? Well, the Church was a big fan of re-appropriating pagan holidays. They took Lupercalia and made it a Saint’s celebration day, took the festival of Sol Invictus and made it Christmas; they were pros when it came to this stuff.
The Catholic Church determined that they would bring the Jewish festival of Passover and the Christian observance of the resurrection together. This was done under the vigil of the Roman Emperor Constantine (the first Christian Emperor), at the first Council of Nicaea. The title of “Easter month” was taken from the pagans, as the Church observed its use in Northern Europe, and sought to both marginalize the pagan celebration and indoctrinate/accommodate new pagan subjects.
And there you have it. Sorry, Eostre, but they took your month. Somehow the rabbits and eggs stuck around, though.
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